Read Julius Caesar by email.
Three weeks: a conspiracy, a funeral, and a war.
Rome, and two tribunes telling a crowd to go home and stop celebrating. Twenty-three mornings: a conspiracy assembled in the first week, Caesar dead before the halfway mark, and then a funeral at which two speeches turn the same crowd twice.
Three or four minutes a day, and every installment opens with a line reminding you where you left off.
Three weeks from now, you will have read Shakespeare.
23 installments, one an email
- First published
- 1599
- Installments
- 23
- Each installment
- 3–4 min
How long it takes
- Words
- 21,078
- Reading time
- 1 hour 28 minutes
- At 5 minutes a day
- 3 weeks
- At 10 minutes a day
- 9 days
- At 20 minutes a day
- 4 days
At 240 words a minute, the average for adult silent reading. Use your own speed
Why read Julius Caesar?
Julius Caesar is the most orderly of the tragedies for this — eighteen scenes, a median installment of 956 words, and a plot that turns on public events you could keep in a diary. The first week is the conspiracy being assembled: Cassius working on Brutus, a storm full of omens, a sleepless night in Brutus’s orchard. Then the Capitol, then the Forum. Then it becomes a war, and Act V arrives as five short dispatches from a battlefield — one of them sixty-five words long, Brutus sending an order across the field, and that is the entire email.
The verse arrives as verse — speaker names in small capitals, stage directions in italics, lines breaking where the pentameter breaks. Five scenes need more than one email, and they are the five you would guess: Cassius working on Brutus in the street, the orchard, the assassination, the Forum, and the quarrel in Brutus’s tent. Each is cut at an entrance or an exit, taking the combination that makes the longest part shortest, so the seam is always a door opening and never a word count.
Installment 1 is the playbill — thirty-four persons of the play, and a setting that runs from Rome to Philippi — then two tribunes clearing the streets of people cheering a man who has not come on stage yet. Caesar is dead before the halfway mark with nearly half the play still to come, which is the joke of the title, and it lands harder in an inbox than on a page: the emails keep arriving, and the man they are named after is not in them.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to read Julius Caesar?
About an hour and a half straight through (21,078 words). By email, it’s 23 daily installments of three to four minutes — about three weeks, or faster at a premium pace of two or three scenes a day.
Is this the complete, unabridged text?
Yes — all eighteen scenes in the carefully typeset Standard Ebooks edition, including Cinna the poet being killed for having the wrong name, the proscription scene in which three men agree to each other’s relatives, and the dramatis personae. Nothing is trimmed or modernized.
How does a play work as email?
One scene per email, in play formatting: speaker names in small capitals, stage directions in italics, verse lines kept as verse. The median installment is 956 words, three or four minutes. Five of the eighteen scenes are long enough to split; the other thirteen arrive whole, including all five scenes of Act V, the shortest of which is sixty-five words.
Do the recaps spoil anything?
Each recap covers only the previous scene, so nothing arrives before the play delivers it. The play itself is far less careful: the title tells you a man dies, a soothsayer names the date in the first week, and Caesar is warned three more times before he goes.
How does it arrive?
One installment per email, one email a day, at the hour you pick, with a one-line recap of the previous scene at the top. Free. Unsubscribe or pause anytime.
Standard Ebooks edition, public domain. Texts from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg editions. Not affiliated with either.